SWTOR classes are faction-specific

Another crumb of information on Star Wars: the Old Republic has dropped from BioWare's jealously-guarded fact cake. All the character classes in the MMO will side with only one of the game's factions - Jedi or Sith.

In a developer blog about the recently-revealed Bounty Hunter class, writer Daniel Erickson said that this was a product of two early decisions: that every class would have its own story, and that no story would exist on both sides of the factional divide.

"Star Wars is a story about good and evil - it simply doesn't make sense to have Jedi and Sith doing the same quests," he said. "Creating one batch of content for all players would have been half the cost, taken half the time and solved any number of organizational headaches but it was simply the wrong choice from a storytelling perspective."

Erickson explained that this ruled out a Republic bounty hunter. "Which leads me to the third decision we made: No class would exist in both factions - at least at first. Each class gets its own story; no story content exists on both sides. If we did Bounty Hunters on both sides of the fence, we'd have to write two different Bounty Hunter stories at the expense of a different class that was more iconic to the Republic."

Erickson went on to give some hints as to the storylines and gameplay that the Bounty Hunter quest line would encompass. "At the heart of the Bounty Hunter story is the hunt itself. Smugglers, Jedi, Sith, rebel leaders, rogue droids, assassins, entire gangs or embezzling underlings, the Bounty Hunter takes them all down. Each hunt has its own flavor and each hunt brings with it a unique set of challenges and choices.

"Do you follow the job's description to the letter and kill the wayward daughter of a powerful officer or do you bring her in alive and force the man to do his own dirty work? Will you take a bribe to fake a kill you didn't make - will you switch sides when it's clear the person you're hunting has more honor and justification for his actions than the one who sent you?"

Star Wars: the Old Republic is in development for PC and has no release date. More at the gamepage.